TWENTY-ONE
It was a warm day for autumn, so Angela was wearing the same low-rise cutoff shorts she intended to wear to her bartender job later. She had delivered a half dozen courier drop-offs for lawyers, and was about to head to Barry’s Place to work until they closed, when she got a call from Mike’s Mail Service.
Mike handled a variety of mail-related services for people, including collecting drop-offs for UPS and FedEx. When people occasionally brought him something that needed to be delivered locally by courier, he would call Angela. It wasn’t often, but it all added up to make ends meet.
When she walked into Mike’s place, he was making out UPS shipping labels. “What’s up?” she asked.
Mike came to the counter. “A courier came in from Syracuse. He’s never been down here and doesn’t know the area. He couldn’t locate the address for his package. He said he’s a small courier service and he’s really outside his element down here. He needed to get back and asked me if I could have a local courier finish the delivery. He left some cash with the package.”
Angela shrugged. “Sure, no problem.”
Mike pulled the box from under the counter. It was long and light. She thought it might be long-stemmed roses.
When she saw the address, she immediately understood why the courier couldn’t find the place. It was in the industrial area where most of the abandoned factories were located. The area was a maze of streets, alleys, vast concrete expanses, buildings, loading docks, and train tracks with sidings beside old factories, as well as fenced areas guarding corroded, outdated factory equipment and heavy machinery parts slowly rusting away.
Many of the buildings had collapsed roofs, leaving only standing walls. Several of the buildings were still in good enough shape to be used for things like equipment storage. A few offered small office or business space. Those office areas were dingy and crude, but they were cheap and used only occasionally by the people who stored equipment there long-term.
Even though a few of the buildings were occasionally still used, Angela had never seen anyone in the area.
Because the old industrial tract was a labyrinth of derelict buildings, the addresses were confusing and for the most part missing. None of it was accurately located on any GPS. You just about had to be familiar with the abandoned area to find anything. The city didn’t care to spend money maintaining what was, in essence, a ghost town, so street signs were rare. She suspected they were stolen for souvenirs or for decorations in teenagers’ bedrooms.
Her grandparents had often taken Angela with them on a Sunday drive. Usually those rides went through the countryside, to be followed with getting an ice cream cone, but on occasion her grandfather would take them through the old industrial area, pointing out factories he had helped build. More than once Angela had listened to his stories of where a man had once died, hit by a girder swinging past him, and where another man had a heart attack and fell into freshly poured concrete footings, and where a fight had broken out over a dice game and one of the men had been stabbed to death.
“The guy left this as well,” Mike said. He laid two twenties and a ten on top of the long package. “He said this should cover it for finishing the delivery. He was insistent that it was supposed to be delivered quickly. He said he was a small one-man service, and his income depended on his reputation remaining good. I told him I had the right courier.”
Angela was much the same way—her courier business was built on good word of mouth. She gave the ten to Mike for handling the job. Paying him a commission kept him using her messenger service when he needed one.
“Thanks Mike. Catch you the next time.”
Once in her truck with the package, Angela pulled out an old map of Milford Falls that her grandfather had given her. She studied the map, trying to figure out where the address for Hartland Irrigation would be. She had a pretty good idea and the map confirmed her initial thought.
When she reached the old industrial area, rolling along among the abandoned factory buildings, she didn’t see any people or cars. There weren’t any new business in Milford Falls looking for factory space, so there was nothing keeping the industrial area from continuing its slow decay.
She recognized one of the businesses she passed. The space was rented by an old guy who welded together pieces of junk steel he scavenged from the abandoned buildings. He created fanciful animals out of the junk and sold the pieces at art fairs. The building he was in was perfect for that sort of thing—concrete, steel, and brick. Nothing to burn down with his torch and no one to interrupt him as he worked. But he was getting old and in ill health, so he was rarely there anymore.
Angela passed a building with rows of high windows divided up into small squares. Most of the glass had long ago been broken out. She recognized the place.
When she had first encountered the man who killed the red-haired girl, she had seen that particular building in the vision she’d had. That was the first time she had recognized that a man was a killer by looking into his eyes. He was also the first man she had killed. She had sent that killer down the hell hole after she’d made him confess every detail of what he’d done in order to confirm her vision.
As she drove past, she saw the cistern where that killer had put the body. It was sad to see such a place, and to know that the body of an innocent victim had surely rotted away down in the lonely, dark, wet hole long before Angela had encountered her killer.
Angela drove on among the buildings, looking for Hartland Irrigation. She didn’t see signs for it anywhere. That was hardly unusual. The place being so isolated and desolate was also probably why the sender didn’t mail the package, or send it by UPS, and instead sent it by courier.
Many of the buildings were covered with graffiti. Taggers, like the rats, came out at night. It was a sketchy area. Fortunately, she always carried a gun in the center console of her truck. But the graffiti was old. There was no one to see their work, so the taggers had moved back to bridges, walls, and businesses in town.
She at last spotted the address painted on a lonely, dented, tan steel door. There were no windows, and there was no name to go with the address. There was an older, beige, four-door Toyota Camry parked by the door. Out of habit when she delivered packages in rough areas she committed the license plate number to memory.
The black paint of the address did look somewhat fresh compared to all the other peeling paint. She parked next to the Camry and hopped out of her truck.
When she pounded on the metal door, she heard someone inside yell to come in. The door scraped on buckled concrete when she pulled it open. Inside was a small room without a ceiling or furniture, lit only by the high skylights and windows in the open area beyond. Long chains on geared rollers hung down to tilt the windows open at the top.
No one was in the small room. Voices echoed from out back.
Angela went through the opening in the front room, into the vast area of the old factory floor. Gray metal shelves stood to the right, sectioning off a smaller area from the open factory building beyond. To the left was another room.
There were several stained folding tables in front of the shelves. Old, dirty blankets covered lumpy shapes on the tables. She noticed that items on the shelves were also covered in ratty old blankets or greasy moving pads. Other than a few small work lights clamped to the tables, most of the light came from the high windows on the far wall. Dilapidated wooden rolling chairs were pushed up to the tables with the lights. It was a dingy work area for whatever Hartland Irrigation did.
Not far beyond the shelves there were several types of milling machines and a pair of red gas-powered generators to run them and the minimal lighting.
“Hello!” Angela called into the empty factory. “I have a delivery.” Her voice echoed back from the darkness.
A man in work overalls rushed out from the room to the left, wiping his hands with a filthy rag.
Angela recognized him.
Three other men followed him out of the room.
She recognized all four men. They were the four Hispanic men she had waited on at the bar the night Owen had come in.
“A delivery, yes, thank you, come in,” one of them said in a heavy accent. He gestured with a hand, inviting her in closer.
As the other three came forward she got a good look at their eyes for the first time. It had been dark in the bar and the rotating ceiling light made it difficult to see anyone’s eyes unless they were close, the way Owen had been.
After Angela learned that she could recognize killers by looking at their eyes, she came to learn to recognize a range of threat in the eyes of people who hadn’t yet committed murder.
Frankie’s eyes had been like that. Not a killer’s, but something close. Boska’s eyes had been even worse. They were the eyes of someone extremely dangerous, someone with a violent temper, someone who would hurt you, even though he had not yet killed anyone.
Both Frankie and Boska had the eyes of men who could at some point easily cross that line into murder.
The eyes of these four men were like that. Cunning. Calculating. Cruel.
Boska had a certain cast to his eyes when he wanted her. A look of focused lust. A look of commitment to getting what he wanted. It was a look that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and paralyzed her with fear.
These four men had that look in their eyes.
Mole-face moved off behind her and into the front room.
She heard the dead bolt on the front door click home.
Angela was a rabbit in the center of a pack of rabid dogs.